For some types of wireless communication systems, it is advantageous or necessary that the transmitter know the channel characteristics prior to transmitting. As an example, consider multiple input multiple output (MIMO) communication systems. In a MIMO system, each station has multiple transceivers. A station is capable of either transmitting multiple signals simultaneously via different antennas, or receiving multiple signals simultaneously via different antennas. In these systems, it maybe advantageous to adjust the powers or other parameters of the different transmitted signals based upon the characteristics of the transmission channels. To do this, the transmitting station must have knowledge of the channels' characteristics.
One way to get this knowledge is to transmit known measurement signals to the receiver, perform channel estimates at the receiver based upon the received signals, and then send the channel estimate information back to the original transmitting station.
This solution is costly in terms of data transmission efficiency. Transmitting the channel estimate back to the originator is an overhead that subtracts from the data transmission time, as is the need to send a known signal to the receiver. In addition, the time delays involved in doing this may make the channel information “stale” or out of date by the time it is obtained at the originator.
It is therefore desirable to reduce the aforementioned overhead associated with conventional transmit channel estimation.
Exemplary embodiments of the present invention can reduce overhead by estimating a relationship between the transmit and receive channels associated with a transceiver, and then estimating the transceiver's transmit channel at any time based on the aforementioned relationship.